Living with Rebecca

Sally Beauman has written a companion novel to
Daphne du Maurier's 1938 classic Rebecca. She explains why she felt compelled
to give du Maurier's silent heroine a voice, and describes the strange
sensation of being haunted by a fictional character.

Haunted by Rebecca:Sally Beauman

How do books begin? Where do they come from? This is
a question novelists are always being asked - and I've always found it
difficult to answer. In my own case, usually, I start to see scenes, or hear
voices. I get glimpses of a character, or a situation, and I know they may lead
the way to the next book. They usually come to me as I'm approaching the end of
the previous novel, and they're always shadowy and elusive, like the snatches
of a dream. But my new novel Rebecca's Tale had a very different gestation.
When it's published this September, it will be nearly seven years since I first
thought of it - and seven years is a very long time to be pregnant. It will be
a relief, finally, to give birth.

As the title indicates, my book is linked to Daphne
du Maurier's 1938 classic novel, Rebecca. But it is not, and was never intended
to be, a sequel. On the whole, I dislike and distrust sequels, and those that
I've read have always been pale shadows of the original. It can be read by
those who know Rebecca intimately, and by those who have never read du
Maurier's book (and for them, there's a treat in store). In other words, my
novel is deeply indebted to du Maurier's but also, I hope, free and independent
of it. We certainly return to Manderley, but we look at that dark and resonant
fictional domain from a very different angle, and there are some surprises in
store.

I'd always been deeply interested in du Maurier's
work, and I've always felt it had been much misunderstood and misinterpreted.
Du Maurier herself resented the tag 'romantic novelist', which attached itself
to her during her lifetime, and still obstinately adheres now: she felt it was
unjust - and I agree with her. Some of her novels may fall within the romance
category, but Rebecca, I believe, does not. If anything, it is an anti-romance
- a clever, cunning and subversive attack on the very genre to which it would
be consigned. Yet at the time of publication, that aspect of the novel was
ignored, and the novel's ambivalences remain relatively uninvestigated to this
day. Why? It was when I first began to ask myself that question that the seeds
of my own Rebecca's Tale were sown.

It was late in 1993, and I was writing an article
about du Maurier, and Rebecca, for New Yorker magazine. The more closely I
looked at the book, the more fascinated I became. Du Maurier's publisher,
Victor Gollancz, had received the manuscript with jubilation. He predicted it
would be a huge bestseller (and of course he was correct; Rebecca has never
been out of print since). In his view, it was "an exquisite love story" - and
he duly promoted it as such. In the run-up to publication, du Maurier's was the
sole dissenting voice. She feared the novel was too dark to win popular
readership; she saw it, she told Gollancz, as "grim".

I think she was right. I also think (and du Maurier
was too modest to make such claims) Rebecca is a brilliant, astonishing and
prescient novel. You could argue that, in Mrs de Winter, the famously
'anonymous' second wife who tells the story, she created the first unreliable
narrator in popular fiction. De Winter is a narrator so convincing and so
persuasive that most readers never look beyond the gaucheries of her prose, and
never notice the devices du Maurier uses to undermine it. Certainly, reviewers
leapt to the assumption that the narrator's views and the author's were one and
the same. Examine Rebecca closely, and you begin to see how wrong they were.
The novel may seem to celebrate the sweet 'feminine' virtues embodied in the
second Mrs de Winter - obedience, modesty, sexual inexperience, naivety, a
willingness to conform to male ideas as to suitable female or wifely behaviour
- but does it actually do that? No. The woman who rises triumphant from the
novel is Rebecca, the disobedient and profoundly transgressive first wife.

That she does so is an extraordinary technical feat
on du Maurier's part. Rebecca is dead when the novel commences; she neither
speaks nor appears in it; she is the antithesis of conventional female virtue,
yet she burns the imagination. Vengeful, rebellious, indestructible and superb,
she rises from the dead to avenge herself on the husband who has killed her.
She destroys him, his house and the entire social structure he represents -
and, like the woman in Sylvia Plath's poem who boasts 'I rise with my red
hair/And I eat men like air', she achieves a terrifying, mythic stature. This
female avatar is dangerous - and she haunts the reader long after the last page
is turned.

It was then, writing my New Yorker article, that I
first began to imagine her story. How would it be if one altered the camera
angle, and looked at events at Manderley from the first wife's point of view? I
thought of Jean Rhys's fascinating novel Wide Sargasso Sea, which tells the
story of Bertha Rochester's early life, and rescues her from the madwoman's
attic to which Charlotte Bronte confined her in Jane Eyre. Du Maurier's novel,
of course, has many deliberate echoes of Bronte's. So I wondered, what would
one discover if one looked at Manderley, that quintessential male domain, from
Rebecca's point of view?

In 1938, it would have been very difficult for a
novelist to do that, certainly a novelist like du Maurier, who was aiming at a
wide readership. The proprieties of her time had to be observed; if she
intended to celebrate Rebecca (and I think she did), she could not do so
openly: she was forced to take a covert approach. There are no such
restrictions now. So who was Rebecca? Where did she come from? Was she the
unprincipled and promiscuous woman that her gentleman husband claimed - or
something other? Du Maurier deliberately occludes Rebecca's past; she gives
only the tiniest of hints, hidden away in the narrative - but that was fine,
from my point of view. It meant I was free to invent, free to imagine. And from
the moment I finished writing the New Yorker article, that was what I began to
do.

Time passed, however. I was working on other novels,
and I pushed Manderley to the back of my mind. Then, some three years ago now,
I was invited to speak at the du Maurier festival in Cornwall, and while there
met du Maurier's son, Christian Browning.

I talked to him at unpardonable length about my
Rebecca ideas; he listened with generosity and patience and finally (I'll
always be grateful to him for this leap of faith) he turned to me and said, "If
it interests you that much, why don't you do it?"

The next day, electric with nerves, I took the train
back to London. I thought about the book that would become Rebecca's Tale the
entire way. By the time I arrived at Paddington, some four hours later, I had
the entire shape of the book blocked out in my mind. I knew I wanted multiple
narrators, so the text was destabilised and no one character could be regarded
as the repository of narrative truth. I knew I wanted the book to have a gender
divide, so it was split fifty-fifty, male/female, at its heart. I knew that,
honouring du Maurier's novel, this book should ask questions rather than
provide pat answers. And I knew that, if I was to make it work as it could and
should work, I had to find a voice for Rebecca herself: if I didn't do that,
and do it convincingly, the book was stillborn.

It is for others to decide if I've been successful in
that aim. All I can say is that to write in Rebecca's voice was an
extraordinary experience - one of the strangest episodes I can recall. I
usually write 'cold' - very cold. I like to be distanced from my material. I
write, and rewrite, endlessly, circling my subject matter in a slow, crab-like
way. When I came to write the 'Rebecca' section of this book, none of that
pertained. All I knew when I began was that this voice had to come from the
very edge; I had to push it as far as I dared. So I started - and I found I was
writing fast, so fast that it felt like taking dictation. At times, I felt I
was struggling to keep up - and that was both exhilarating and unnerving. It's
not something that's ever happened to me before; I don't expect it to happen
again - nor am I sure I would want it to do so.

That experience can't be explained. You could call it
a haunting, I suppose, or a possession. But one of the central concerns of
Rebecca's tale is suppression - the ways in which, even today, the male
viewpoint and the male voice, tends to dominate, while the female, the soprano
voice, is drowned out by the swelling chorus of bass and baritone. That's as
true, one might suggest, of literature as it is of - say - politics. So perhaps
that's why it felt as if Rebecca grabbed her chance at an aria; she'd been
written out, or silenced, too long.